Pride rose in his chest. He’d never known a woman so courageous.
The mention of evidence sent the rector into a panic. “Where is Miss Bourne? She should have returned by now. This will all end badly. Mrs Hodge said as much when?—”
“Well, she’ll nae have much to say anymore.”
Olivia gasped. “Is that what you do when members disagree? Silence them by any means necessary?”
“The cause is all that matters.”
“And lining your pockets in the process.”
“When will this madness end?” the rector whimpered. “Do you really think there’s a list out there? Perhaps it was nothing but an idle threat.”
“And the lass happened to find her way here from Cambridge? Poking her nose around the graveyards and visiting The Burnished Jade?”
“But you’ve abducted a marchioness,” the rector cried. “If we don’t hang for sedition, we’ll hang for that.”
“Miss Bourne packed her clothes. Rothley will think she’sleft him. ’Tis a familiar pattern in his life. One he’s come to expect.”
Gabriel felt the sting of those words.
The past threatened to surface like an undead corpse.
“Gabriel knows I would never leave him,” Olivia said, laying a mortstone over any doubt, burying history with it. “I made a vow to him, and to Mrs Boswell, not to leave without speaking to them first.”
Mrs Boswell.
He was curious to know the details of that conversation.
“You’re all fretting unnecessarily.” A woman spoke, the words ringing with certainty. “Rothley will be dead in the woods. Katherine will have the valise. When she returns with it, we will deliver the traitor’s daughter to Studland Park and raze that monstrosity to the ground.”
Gabriel smiled to himself, satisfaction slithering through his veins. He glanced at Dalton, drew the blade from his boot, and entered the drawing room.
Olivia sat on a crude wooden chair, her hands bound in her lap.
Their eyes met. Anger surged at the bruise on her cheek.
It took everything in him not to go to her first.
Instead, he turned to Mrs Culpepper, who looked the picture of health. “I suggest you reconsider, madam. I believe there’s a flaw in your plan.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Olivia caught sight of Gabriel, standing in the doorway, eyes dark as Erebus, only softening when they landed on her. In that split second, she saw it: relief, the well of emotion he was struggling to contain. Then his gaze shifted an inch, to the bruise marring her cheek, and a shadow passed over his features.
A tear rolled down her cheek. “You came.”
“I’d go to the ends of the earth to find you.”
He scanned the room like a predator deciding who to slay first. The quaking rector? The conniving baronet? The three men with necks as wide as mooring posts? The aunt who had made a miraculous recovery? Treachery her only ailment.
“We can do this the easy way.” Gabriel cracked his neck. “Surrender and face trial for your crimes. Or I hurt you.” He glared at Mrs Culpepper. “Every last one of you.”
Mrs Culpepper moved closer, the tip of the blade she concealed pricking Olivia’s nape. “There is an alternative. You surrender, or watch your wife die before my men kill you.”
She saw him stiffen.
“Miss Bourne is in custody and ready to give names. The evidence is locked away safely at the Order’s office. Hurt my wife, and none of you will leave here alive.”
